(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Mike Benz, a former State Department official and prominent conservative podcaster, said that the recent decline in the influence of rap music seemed to be suspiciously synched to the Trump administration’s disruption of USAID’s financial pipeline.
The U.S. Agency for International Development was widely known for funding non-governmental organizations to engage in social-engineering experiments, while potentially functioning as the CIA’s secret piggy bank for funding color revolutions and dark-site biolabs.
Yet, even the globalist projects that the operation openly admitted to backing struck concerned taxpayers as wasteful and pointless exercises in American imperialism.
USAID was run during the Biden administration by former United Nations ambassador Samantha Power, a top Obama surrogate who — along with other behind-the-scenes operatives such as Susan Rice and Lisa Monaco (collectively known as the “Furies”) — was tasked with overseeing the administrative shadow government, despite never having been elected.
Some have suggested that Power, herself, may have been a CIA plant.
As one of his first acts in his second term, President Donald Trump directed Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to cut the wasteful spending, folding remainder of USAID’s operations under the purview of the State Department.
Benz recently reacted to a post from podcaster Lauren Chen pointing out the apparent correlation between rap having faded from the Billboard Hot 100 and USAID’s defunding.
“Call me the oracle 🔮,” he wrote, alongside a screenshot from a February 2025 post where he said “USAID runs the rap game.”
Reactions noted many of the other astroturfed operations being run through the agency, such as paid protests, effectively using Americans’ tax dollars to lie to and manipulate them on behalf of the Deep State.
Benz has long argued that a public—private partnership, similar to the censorship operations to limit conservative social media during the Biden era, has been in place for decades in the music industry.
In fact, a well-known conspiracy theory on the subject stems from an anonymous email, dated April 24, 2012, that was published on the blog “Hip Hop Is Read.”
The email — sent by a person identifying as “John Smith” from the account [email protected] — recounted a secret meeting among record-industry executives in 1991.
It purported to be from an industry insider who had witnessed the meeting firsthand.
“Between the late 80’s and early 90’s, I was what you may call a ‘decision maker’ with one of the more established company [sic] in the music industry,” said the author. “… Since technology and media weren’t accessible to people like they are today, the industry had more control over the public and had the means to influence them anyway it wanted.”
The author went on to recount the gathering of 25 to 30 industry executives at a private residence on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
“Little did I know that we would be asked to participate in one of the most unethical and destructive business practice I’ve ever seen,” he wrote.
The email claimed that the gangsta rap genre was developed as a means to encourage mass incarceration within the black community, while pivoting away from politically aware rappers like Ice Cube to those who advocated for more destructive philosophies.
“Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice,” said the email.
The unnamed record executive who pitched the idea “assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies, and as employee, we’d also be able to buy personal stocks in these prisons,” it added.
Regardless of whether the link to the prison pipeline bears out, the idea that outside forces actively conspired to dumb down the music industry is more than just a theory. It is widely accepted that record companies have relied on algorithms to make popular music more generic — and thus more predictable for marketing purposes.
NPR, another formerly government-funded left-wing propaganda machine, investigated the conspiracy theory surrounding the 2012 email in October 2020 (which also happened to be a particularly active time for the Deep State). However, it sought to further redirect the discussion away from whether the government was meddling in the music industry, carping instead on the issue of mass incarceration.
“Whether the actual conspiracy theory is true or not is inconsequential compared to the real world facts that inform its speculation,” NPR declared. “The dialogue generated tells us that the fear and paranoia around how the criminal justice system disproportionately impacts Black people in this country is very real.”
But ultimately, it was rappers who played a pivotal role in breaking the government-coopted music industry’s chains over the black community — even if that mean effecting the demise of the rap genre from a marketing standpoint.
Anti-woke performers like Cardi B, Lil Pump, Afroman, Meek Mill, Waka Flocka Flame, Sexyy Red, Kodak Black, Kanye West and Lil Wayne were among those who refused to back the Biden/Harris ticket, leading President Donald Trump to claim an unprecedented (for the modern-era GOP) share of the black, male vote.
Some even celebrated Trump’s authenticity by likening him to a gangsta rapper.
“[H]e’s got a lot of n***a in him,” comedian Eddie Griffin joked. “He got three baby mamas, 43 felony cases and counting, selling high-top tennis shoes just like Michael Jordan, got shot just like Tupac — the motherf**ker gonna drop an album next.”
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
